The other day, I hooked up my NES to a new TV and I started up a game that uses the Zapper gun and it wont work. Fortunatly I have a TV from 1985, so I hooked up the NES on that and then the Zapper started working fine. Does this mean that only older TVs can use the zapper?
yes, i can confirm the zapper will not work on an LCD TV. However, the term "older" is not entirely correct, since you can still buy CRT tvs, but they are bigger and heavier than "newer" style TVs with LCD, Plasma, etc.
and i bet the other "zapper" type guns for the SNES and Genesis work the same way.
Note that rear-projection CRTs also don't work. (I've tried using a PS1 and a GunCon on my such HDTV.) It has to be a direct-view CRT. Unfortunately, I don't know exactly why it doesn't work on other display technologies.
In my opinion, the mechanism for using the zapper with a game like duck hunt should work with any TV. When you trigger the gun, the targets are "whitened" and if detected by the gun, it dies. I remember having fun shooting on a white piece of paper or a white wall. :)
I'm not certain about the exact mechanism but that's what my cousin and I concluded from our experimentation. Wikipedia probably has the answer somewhere...
It should also be noted that the NES zapper's mechanism is completely different than the super scope, guncon, etc. for other consoles.
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